It might come as a surprise to learn that the third largest collection of Vivaldi manuscripts belongs to Manchester. How these priceless scores came to reside in the city’s Henry Watson Music Library is a fascinatingly convoluted tale involving the acquisition by Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel’s Messiah, of manuscripts purchased – by weight – from a bankrupted Italian cardinal.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that this stack was discovered, by Michael Talbot, to contain 12 previously unknown violin sonatas and the only fair copy of The Four Seasons bearing the evidence of supervision in Vivaldi’s own hand. Appropriately, it was the Manchester Four Seasons that Adrian Chandler’s ensemble La Serenissma elected to play with the part-books proudly on display in the foyer.

In truth, the differences between the Manchester Seasons and the more familiar one exist at the scholarly level of the articulation of slurs and certain antiphonal effects. But the main Mancunian revelation was the less prescriptive approach these parts took to the figured bass, enabling the violas to become pleasingly present in the resulting transparency of texture.

Among the more obscure items in the Manchester stash is a pair of concertos written for a defunct version of the violin known as a “violin in tromba marina”. Little is known about them other than that they mimicked the original, one-stringed instrument (tromba marina), probably had three strings, were very loud and featured metal components intended to rasp like a trumpet. Chandler’s conjectural reconstruction is the only playable example in the world, and raised the question: why might you take a perfectly good fiddle, remove one of the strings and make it buzz? The answer supplied by these dark, abrasive concertos seemed to lie in Vivaldi’s avant-garde approach to tone colour; exploring the sonic combination of virtuosity, volume and distortion 250 years before Jimi Hendrix.

• This review was amended on 23 February 2016 to clarify the difference between the violin in tromba marina and the original tromba marina.